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Panoz announces all its cars will get self-healing paint

Among the Corvette ZR1s, Mustang GT350s and Dodge Demons, it's sometimes easy to forget that not every American sports car comes from the Big 3. There are small independent shops, one of the longest-running of which is Panoz. The company still builds coupes and roadsters based on its long-running Esperante, featuring custom-built 6.2-liter V8s. Now they come with another interesting feature: self-healing paint.

The company partnered with Feynlab to use Feynlab's Self-Heal Plus coating on new Panoz paint jobs. The coating is a memory polymer that, when scratched, can reform in its original configuration when exposed to heat. The companies say it works with light scratches and swirl marks, and that those blemishes can be healed by leaving the car in the sun, or by using a hair dryer. We suspect that really deep scratches down to the bare body panels won't be as easily repaired.

The coating is a standard feature on all new Panoz cars. That's good to hear, because a new Panoz isn't cheap. The most affordable model is the Esperante Spyder, starting at $159,000. The next cheapest is the Avezzano GT coupe, shown above, at $159,900.